The way Darrian Loganexplained it to the 20 or so 7- to 11-year-old girls seated around four tables in a summer camp dining hall, the future of American space travel rested on their little shoulders.

“NASA gave us a little project to do,” Darrian said. “In a few years, they need people like you ladies to build rockets for them.”

Then he and his fellow Camp Moss Hollow staffer Evan Simmons put a bowl of marshmallows and a pile of uncooked spaghetti at each table.

The link to rockets may not have been obvious, but this was part of a new class at Moss Hollow. It’s part of an effort by NASA’s education office to teach STEM concepts — science, technology, engineering and math — in interesting ways. Earlier this year, representatives from the space agency taught the curriculum to camp staffers. Other lessons include making paper airplanes and building tiny cardboard cars propelled by balloons.

This afternoon’s assignment: the Leaning Tower of Pasta. The girls of the Boxwood cabins had to work in teams to design and construct spaghetti-marshmallow towers capable of holding a Ping-Pong ball. If the Ping-Pong ball was safely cradled, a highlighter and then a pair of scissors would be added to see if the towers could stand the strain.

“And, yes, you can eat the marshmallows,” Darrian said. “At the end of the exercise.”

I don’t know what motivates NASA engineers, but marshmallows seem to work with 7-year-old girls.

The girls from her cabin — Boxwood 3 — decided that a rectangle has four sides and proceeded to sketch out their design on construction paper. It was a basic cube, with a marshmallow at each corner and spaghetti struts in between.

The girls of Boxwood 1 went for something more pyramidal in shape. The girls from Boxwood 4 had an organic shape, semi-pentagonal. It looked a bit like a model of a newly discovered molecule: marshmallonium, perhaps.

Boxwood 2 started out with a wall — tall and narrowly horizontal — until the girls realized it wouldn’t stand up on its own and disassembled it to make something a little more sturdy.

Marshmallows were precious — there was a finite supply — but the spaghetti seemed endless. A lot of measure-once-and-cut-twice was going on as lengths of pasta were snapped in half or quartered, only to discover that they were now too small.

The girls had 12 minutes to construct their towers. When they were done, they admired their sticky handiwork. None of the creations were particularly soaring. Saturn V’s they were not. But they didn’t have to be graceful. They only had to work…

Not to be outdone by their fellow fundamentalists on the other side of the “God Chasm” – some fundamentalist Christians jumped in with some designs of their own.

Turns out the new swimwear is attractive to “godless” non-believers – not the least reason of which is protection from the Sun’s harmful rays. No woman worth her hair spray wants to look 65 when she is 35. And fair skinned ladies especially need to be concerned about the long term effects – including skin cancer – which puts “dying to look good” in a whole new category.

OK Guys – definitely not as much viewing fun as you itsy-bitsy yellow polka-dot Bikini… Or as cool as a Burkini…A swimsuit from Simply Modest

Crystal Huyben, 27, a born-again Christian from Ontario, likes to cover everything from her knees to her collarbone when she gets in the water.

“Modesty has always been important to me, believing that our sexuality is an amazing gift from God,” she said. “[It’s] something to be protected, not put on display for all eyes to see.”

Huyben, who sewed her first modest swimsuit when she was a teenager, now runs a company, Simply Modest, selling the garments. Her website Simply Modest is one of about a dozen, all launched over the past decade, marketing suits that protect their wearers from sun, chlorine and lustful stares.

Now, Huyben and other modest swimwear entrepreneurs are finding that their suits are catching on with a secular audience. Tulin Reid, 38, a former plus size model, is a fan of HydroChic, a line of modest- and activewear founded six years ago by two modern Orthodox Jewish women, Sara Wolf and Daniella Teutsch, in New York’s Westchester county.

Last year an opinion piece directed towards women by Tracy McMillan caused the Internet Message Boards to light up. Tracy has published a follow on piece n HuffPo – which I am sure is going to cause as much controversy. With only 42% of black women who will ever marry, and the statistics of even divorced black women not looking too good – its probably time to start delving a little deeper into he issue than metro-sexual black men, or all the good men are locked up in Prison. Black women, by and large do the same things as their white counterparts. Reminds me of a conversation with a Jewish woman I dated, when on the first date she volunteered “So you a tired of the black women who are b*tches, and the white ones who are crazy.”

1. You’re a B*tch.
Here’s what I mean by b*tch. I mean you’re angry. You probably don’t think you’re angry. You think you’re super smart, or if you’ve been to a lot of therapy, that you’re setting boundaries. But the truth is you’re pissed. At your mom. At the military-industrial complex. At Sarah Palin. And it’s scaring men off.

The deal is: most men just want to marry someone who is nice to them. I am the mother of a 13-year-old boy, which is like living with the single-cell protozoa version of a husband. Here’s what my son wants out of life: macaroni and cheese, a video game, and Kim Kardashian. Have you ever seen Kim Kardashian angry? I didn’t think so. You’ve seen Kim Kardashian smile, wiggle, and make a sex tape. Female anger terrifies men.

Single Guy view – No sane guy out of his teens wants to marry a “b*tch”, “Diva”, or “Queen”. Once those hormones subside a bit about 30, he figures out that while a Diva may be a great “f*ck buddy”, the continued flak of waking up with her for the next 20 years just isn’t worth it.

2. You’re Shallow.
When it comes to choosing a husband, only one thing really, truly matters: character. So it stands to reason that a man’s character should be at the top of the list of things you are looking for, right? But if you’re not married, I already know it isn’t. Because if you were looking for a man of character,you would have found one by now. Men of character are, by definition, willing to commit.

Instead, you are looking for someone tall. Or rich. Or someone who knows what an Eames chair is. Unfortunately, this is not the thinking of a wife. This is the thinking of a teenaged girl. And men of character do not want to marry teenaged girls. Because teenage girls are never happy…

Single Guy view – Go to any black dating website and look at the “want list” of the women there. Whether 4’11” or 6′ tall they all want a guy taller than 5’9″. Since the average height of black men in America is 5’9″ that eliminates 50% of the available men from their searches. Take out married, committed, or in jail – and the number of available black guys gets astonishingly small. Go to any of the Internet dating sites, and over 30 you find a plethora of women over 5’6″ – statistically the largest group. Face it tall ladies – the short girls done stole all your men! If you are really serious about that relationship – get used to wearing flats. Your feet will thank you when you reach 50.

Searching for Denzel. I have a couple of women business friends I’ve known for a long time who have never been married who are in their early 50’s. One is short, dumpy, and very average looking. A recurring scenario is she meets a wildly successful handsome guy, agonizes over every word he says for months – to find out he’s dating someone else, he’s gay, or has a list of psychological problems that would put a poorer person in an Asylum. She doesn’t even get to bed the guy. She went through this with a guy I know who is probably one of the top 5 most eligible guys in town, who has a successful career, has lots of status, is wealthy, and a long family pedigree of successful ancestors – all “must haves” in her book. The problem? Every other single woman in town knows this too. If I’ve got 100 Halle Berrys knocking at my door, character be damned in terms of a sex life… I’m not looking for a date with Whoopi. What I’m looking for is a Halle..with a brain.

3. You’re a Slut.
Hooking up with some guy in a hot tub on a rooftop is fine for the ladies of Jersey Shore — but they’re not trying to get married. You are. Which means, unfortunately, that if you’re having sex outside committed relationships, you will have to stop. Why? Because past a certain age, casual sex is like recreational heroin — it doesn’t stay recreational for long. Continue reading →

Ask a straight man, “How do you like your women?” and it’s unlikely he’ll answer, “Dumb and sleepy.” But according to new findings, these characteristics—and any other traits suggesting that the lady isn’t particularly alert—are precisely what the human male has evolved to look for in a one-night-stand.

In an article soon to be published in Evolution and Human Behavior, University of Texas–Austin graduate student Cari Goetz and her colleagues explored what they called the sexual exploitability hypothesis. The hypothesis is based on thedifferences between male and female reproductive strategies as humans evolved. For ancestral women, casual intercourse with an emotionally unattached man who had no clear intention of sticking around to raise any resulting offspring constituted a massive genetic gamble. By contrast, for a man with somewhere around 85 million sperm cells churned out every day—per testicle—the frivolous expenditure of gametes was far less detrimental to his genetic interests. Goetz and her team began with the assumption that—because our brains evolved long before prophylactics entered the picture—female cognition is still sensitive to the pregnancy-related consequences of uncommitted sex and women remain more reluctant than men to engage in it. They set out to test the idea that any indication that a woman’s guard is lowered—that she’s “sexually exploitable”—is a turn-on for your average man. “[T]he assessment of a woman’s immediate vulnerability,” surmise the authors, “may be central to the activation of psychological mechanisms related to sexual exploitation.”

Reminds me of an old 60’s song…

This is an inflammatory hypothesis, of course, and the language employed in the field doesn’t help matters. It’s worth noting that in the evolutionary psychology sense, the word exploitable simply means that a woman is willing or can be more easily pressured into having sex—which takes her own desires, rather disturbingly, out of the equation. Even if she’s the aggressor, a prostitute, or a certifiable nymphomaniac, having casual sex with her would still constitute “exploiting” her (or at least her body), according to this model. Continue reading →

Twitter user Camila Deborarte tweeted “I’d vote for her.” But Itzel Garcia responded, “What a shame! Even this way, she has to call attention to herself.”

Juarez is running on the ticket of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. She is shown on the poster along with six other women, all of whom are seen covering their breasts with their left hands. Some are raising their right fists.

North Carolina was one of 26 states which involuntarily sterilized women. Most of those women were black and poor.

Like the Tuskegee Experiments, this one stands out as the medical establishment failing. When you hear the Tea Baggers of today talking about “welfare irresponsibility” – this is inevitably where that leads.

Elaine Riddick was 13 years old when she got pregnant after being raped by a neighbor in Winfall, N.C., in 1967. The state ordered that immediately after giving birth, she should be sterilized. Doctors cut and tied off her fallopian tubes.

“I have to carry these scars with me. I have to live with this for the rest of my life,” she said.

Riddick was never told what was happening. “Got to the hospital and they put me in a room and that’s all I remember, that’s all I remember,” she said. “When I woke up, I woke up with bandages on my stomach.”

Riddick’s records reveal that a five-person state eugenics board in Raleigh had approved a recommendation that she be sterilized. The records label Riddick as “feebleminded” and “promiscuous.” They said her schoolwork was poor and that she “does not get along well with others.”

“I was raped by a perpetrator [who was never charged] and then I was raped by the state of North Carolina. They took something from me both times,” she said. “The state of North Carolina, they took something so dearly from me, something that was God given.”

It wouldn’t be until Riddick was 19, married and wanting more children, that she’d learn she was incapable of having any more babies. A doctor in New York where she was living at the time told her that she’d been sterilized.

“Butchered. The doctor used that word… I didn’t understand what she meant when she said I had been butchered,” Riddick said.

North Carolina was one of 31 states to have a government run eugenics program. By the 1960s, tens of thousands of Americans were sterilized as a result of these programs.

Eugenics was a scientific theory that grew in popularity during the 1920s. Eugenicists believed that poverty, promiscuity and alcoholism were traits that were inherited. To eliminate those society ills and improve society’s gene pool, proponents of the theory argued that those that exhibited the traits should be sterilized. Some of America’s wealthiest businessmen of the time were eugenicists including Dr. Clarence Gamble of Proctor and Gamble and James Hanes of the hosiery fortune. Hanes helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists.

It began as a way to control welfare spending on poor white women and men, but over time, North Carolina shifted focus, targeting more women and more blacks than whites. A third of the sterilizations performed in North Carolina were done on girls under the age of 18. Some were as young as nine years old…

This incident happened in the NYC McDonalds. Two women came in and placed an order, for which they presented a $50 bill. The cashier had questions about the bill’s authenticity. Instead of just asking for the manager to come over, one of the women attacked the cashier, climbing over the counter. The second woman goes around the counter to attack the cashier. The cashier ran to the back of the store with the women following, at which point he picked up a metal rod, and put both women down…

At this point, the cashier gets my vote for employee of the year. The women should not have physically assaulted him, and were way out of bounds jumping over the counter to go after him when he tried to retreat. The cashier grabbed what looks like a long tire iron to defend himself. The initial beat down by the cashier was well deserved. Where things – for the cashier – start to go wrong is when the second woman tries to get up. It’s unclear from the video whether she was trying to attack him again or get away. He hits her several times knocking her back to the floor.

With both women down on the floor, the guy doesn’t stop though, despite the effort of a fellow employee to get him to stop beating them – even though they are both down and pose no risk. He also apparently hits one of the woman on the head, a potentially lethal strike – and completely unnecessary.

So yeah – the guy deserves the felony charge the police charged him with. But both of the women also deserve felony assault charges.

Oh well… As James Brown said, “I may not know Karate… But I know K-razor!”… or in this case K-tire iron. Put this one under “American Genocide”…